Continue textile tech fund till end of 11th Plan: Industry body

Coimbatore: The Confederation of Indian Textile Industry (CITI) has asked the Centre to continue with the technology upgradation fund scheme (TUFS) for textile sector in its present form till the end of the 11th Plan period.

The process of capacity building currently in progress in different segments of textile industry could reach reasonable levels by that time and can run on its own stream if only the TUFS assistance is continued for another five year tenure, CITI said.

Expressing apprehensions over reports on possible Government rethinking on continuing the TUFS assistance, the CITI Chairman, Mr Shekhar Agarwal, in a communication said the Government apparently was getting influenced by the suggestion that TUFS assistance should be through cluster-based schemes.

Existing textile units, which want to invest in capacity building, would not be able to relocate to any industry cluster simply because they were large organised units, established in various parts of the country.

In fact, a large textile company is a cluster by itself considering the number of machines/workers employed and the area covered by its production units.

One of the arguments forwarded in support of this approach, according to Mr Agarwal, is that support to individual companies under the TUFS would be inconsistent with the WTO norms.

If so, some of the largest trading countries in the world such as the US and China were too operating support schemes which are inconsistent with the WTO norms.

In many cases, these schemes were being continued despite specific objections from the WTO, he noted.